ABSTRACT
To understand Schenker's conception of music history, one can begin with his negative take on twentieth-century music, as it is central to his entire theoretical project and surfaces repeatedly in both his professional writings and diaries. The relationship of Schenker's mature theory to one of the most characteristic features of early modernist thought in general: its structuralist orientation. Turning to Schenker's theory itself, one of its most distinctive features, already noted, resides in the fact that it is a theory of actual compositional practice rooted in a particular repertoire, not a theory of "music" in a general, abstract sense. Schenker did occasionally initiate searches for an institutional position in Vienna and elsewhere, no doubt partly for financial reasons but also to acquire a more public platform from which to develop his ideas. Sachlich is useful for its association with neue Sachlichkeit, the dominant artistic and ideological movement in the Germanic cultural world during the years Schenker was fine-tuning his mature theory.
